The removal of the Republic of China (ROC) flag from the Web sites of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs and the Office of the US Trade Representative may not have necessarily been a decision made by top officials in US President Donald Trump’s administration, a Washington-based China analyst said on Wednesday.
If this incident could draw the attention of high-level decisionmakers in the US, there might be a turn of events, Bonnie Glaser, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) China Power Project, said at the center’s Asia Forecast 2018 event.
Glaser said that, based on her understanding, in the process of US-Taiwan discussions, the Department of State agreed to remove a line stating that the US recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the only legal government of China from a description on its Web site.
The disappearance of the ROC flag from the two sites’ introductory page for Taiwan came to light on Wednesday. That followed the US Department of State’s removal of the ROC flag from its official Web site in September last year.
Meanwhile, attendees at the event were asked to vote on where they thought a major security incident is most likely to occur: the Korean Peninsula, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait or the Sino-Indian Border.
Out of the 93 attendees who responded to the question, the Taiwan Strait received the lowest number of votes at three, or 3 percent.
The attendees were also asked to vote on five possible outcomes for cross-strait relations this year: collapse due to a kinetic conflict; worsen as Beijing attempts to prevent policies it opposes; remain about the same; stabilize as leaders in Beijing and Taipei focus elsewhere; or improve because of a new US-China understanding.
“First, we have seen, I would say, a new normal in the military activity that China is conducting around Taiwan,” said Glaser, who voted “worsen as Beijing attempts to prevent policies it opposes.”
“So we’ve seen a lot of military aircraft, including bombers and fighter jets that are exercising around Taiwan. This did not take place a few years ago, but now this is constant,” she said.
“Secondly is the squeezing of international space and we’re seeing this being ratcheted up,” she added.
“The Taiwan side has actually retaliated [to China’s announcement of a new M503 flight path] and said that Chinese airlines will not be allowed to put on more flights to bring people who are from Taiwan who live on the mainland back to Taiwan for Chinese New Year,” she said.
While there was “some, maybe small, possibility” of a Beijing-
Taipei understanding when President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) first rose to power, Glaser said she believes that possibility has “evaporated.”
Separately, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the US on Wednesday published a press release, saying it has expressed its position to the US on the flag issue through multiple channels and asked that improvements be made as soon as possible.
Representative to the US Stanley Kao (高碩泰) and his team in Washington have contacted the US and expressed their position on the ROC flag being removed from US government Web sites and several multinational companies being pressured to change their Web sites, the office said.
The US has responded immediately and there is no problem with communication being obstructed, it said.
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